


a warring star full of endless possibilities

by felinedetached



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Non-Linear Narrative, this is dark as fuck yall
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-17
Updated: 2018-07-17
Packaged: 2019-06-11 19:24:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15322551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/felinedetached/pseuds/felinedetached
Summary: Ronan Lynch sometimes feels as if half of himself fell asleep with his father’s death. Fell asleep with his mother, who, in the same moment a crowbar caved in his father’s brain, ceased to work.He’s the son of a dream and a dreamer, the brother to a dream and a liar; not quite human, but not quite not, either.(Dreams don’t work without a Dreamer.)





	a warring star full of endless possibilities

Ronan Lynch sometimes feels as if half of himself fell asleep with his father’s death. Fell asleep with his mother, who, in the same moment a crowbar caved in his father’s brain, ceased to work. 

 

He’s the son of a dream and a dreamer, the brother to a dream and a liar; not quite human, but not quite not, either.

 

(Dreams don’t work without a Dreamer.)

 

Sometimes, fingers beating an impatient beat on his father’s BMW’s steering wheel, he thinks there's a certain lack of- something. He’s not quite sure what it is; that part of him that’s missing, but he thinks it has something to do with the Barns and it’s sleeping inhabitants, his mother and her sleep, his father and his dreaming.

 

Other times, he thinks it has to do with the empty bottle of some kind of spirit lying in his hand; the blood and cuts on his arms; the way he dreams and hopes he’ll never wake up.

 

(He lets Gansey think what he thinks because he’s not entirely wrong; and that, somehow, is the worst of it.)

 

_ Greywaren _ , Cabeswater whispers, and Cabeswater is everything he dreamt it to be and more; better without him than it is with him.

 

(When he dreams, fitful, a shadow clawing at his chest and screaming  _ the dreamer will be unmade _ , he makes flowers and fireflies and the sunrise at dawn in a jar; creations to slow the destruction and keep him sane.

 

The dark drips from his nose, his ears, his eyes, his mouth.

 

He drowns.)

 

\----------

 

Ronan Lynch is vassal to a King, boyfriend of a Magician, friend to a Mirror. He is the creator of the Forest and the caretaker of its caretaker.

 

_ Greywaren _ , Cabeswater tells him, tells Adam, tells anyone that will listen,  _ Greywaren _ .

 

(It does not mean  _ thief _ .)

 

“Dad told me to make sure that Ronan was the name of the hero,” Declan told him once, “not just another spear.”

 

He had understood, back then ( _ do better than me _ ), but he thinks he understands more, now, with Gansey’s death and resurrection, with Cabeswater’s newness, it’s defences, with Adam’s insistence that he still be bound to a mythical place that’s more  _ Ronan _ than it is magic.

 

The key word is  _ thinks _ \- sometimes, gasping on the floor with dream-thick darkness sitting heavy in his lungs and throat and mouth, with Adam’s voice yelling his name high and frantic and worried, he wonders if he ever understood at all.

 

\----------

 

There was a time after his father’s death, where Kavinsky had been the be-all end-all to life; the beginning and middle and end, everything and nothing all at once. Gansey had told him that the difference between them and Kavinsky was that they mattered, in the end; but sometimes Ronan looks over at where he’d last seen white shoes and gold chains, gold rings, cigarette hanging loose from pale lips, K’s voice husky when he says  _ it could have been us, you know _ and he feels his heart pull tight in his chest.

 

“We matter,” Gansey had said, long ago with Monmount trashed behind them and fake IDs scattered over the back seat of the Pig. Ronan isn’t sure Kavinsky hadn’t mattered too.

 

\----------

 

Adam’s hands are very different from Ronan’s own. They’re chapped, sore, so much so that Ronan dreams a soothing ointment; desperate to help in some way.

 

(He knows, he  _ knows _ Adam will try to refuse it; but it is the least Ronan can do.)

 

Ronan’s hands are a fighter’s hands; bruised knuckles and clenched fists, with a resting position that gives him easy access to anything and everything around him.

 

Adam is a worker, a self-made man. Ronan is a fighter, flying high on the coattails of his father and Cabeswater, and he doesn’t care, in the end.

 

\----------

 

As a child, he played in the forest; Opal and Matthew by his side. When he was three, he brought Matthew back with him, a year younger even as they had both been older in the forest.

 

_ Time is circular _ , Cabeswater whispers in his brain; and now, as he stands in something new - something Cabeswater but not quite, not the Cabeswater they used to know - he thinks he understands that a little more.

 

But his mother doesn’t come back; dreams or otherwise, because time isn’t quite  _ that _ circular, and a Demon had had her unmade.

 

Ronan thinks he hates time, if it can’t even do this.

 

\----------

 

Sometimes, Ronan dreams, and the blood on his hands isn’t his own. Sometimes he dreams and comes back with Gansey’s intestines slipping through numb fingers, blood splattered through the room and over his sheets.

 

Sometimes he wakes up to the smell of burning flesh, rotten flesh, the smell of death and disease. On those nights, he throws up, gagging helplessly as not-real (real) deaths invade his mind and his dreams and his room.

 

(Once, he woke up with his mother’s blood staining his arms, all the way to his elbows; woke up to Adam crouched over him, to Opal crying. Once, he woke up, and he knew the death he dreamt had been a real one.)

 

\----------

 

Sometimes, he brings his dad back. Other times, it’s the crowbar, or just  _ pieces _ of Nyall Lynch.

 

Ronan gags then too, hears Chainsaw’s concerned cawing, waves it off and finds his way into the main room, then to his car, then to a liquor store.

 

(It’s easy to get alcohol when you can dream yourself a fake ID. Easier, even, when you can just dream up the alcohol yourself. But sometimes, sometimes, Ronan likes to drink something that he knows didn’t come from hands that ripped apart a night terror with Gansey’s blood still staining them.)

 

\----------

 

Ronan Lynch is not quite human, but not quite not, the son of a dream and a dreamer, brother to a dream and a liar, guardian to a little orphan girl with hooves instead of feet. He’s vassal to the Raven King, boyfriend of a Magician, friend of a Witch.

 

He’s lived his life as a fighter, as a killer, as a dreamer; but now, now that all is said and done, now that a sacrifice has killed a Demon and a forest brought back a King, he thinks he can settle down and be a person, rather than a spear.

 

“Dad told me to make sure that Ronan was the name of the hero,” Declan had told him once, “not just another spear.”

 

Ronan thinks he’d rather be a farmer than a hero.


End file.
